Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World by Leah Broad
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“But this book does not ‘rewrite’ history. It relates a history that has always been there, waiting to be told.”
That was the moment when I knew that I was interested. I am not particularly knowledgeable on classical music history but I am interested in the history of women and how it is told and Leah Broad’s collective biography of four composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen is a remarkable thing which not only recognises that women’s history has always been present but somehow that it has not always been told well, or accurately, or even at all. And so it sets out to right this wrong and present the stories of these four composers and their work across over turbulent and time-changing decades and it does remarkably well.
(I write this listening to Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D Major and I think about how one might be able to compose such a thing, how you can find the language inside of you to create such stuff. Composing has always fascinated me, the way that people can hear the final gathering of it all and pull together all those singular things to create the whole, it is beyond me in a thousand different ways).
What I particularly enjoyed is Broad’s honesty here; she recognises that the figures featured within her text are complicated souls and so makes her case clear from the opening: “This is not a hagiography.” What it is is the story of “interesting” women who blazed and shone in a world which was not ready or able to accept them and Broad gives you everything and does with respect. She loves her subjects, clearly, but also does not excuse them and that is a powerful thing.
There are a thousand films here waiting to be told, not in the least in Doreen Carwithen’s life as an early film composer but also in Ethel Smyth’s queerness and her profound loves, in Dorothy Howell’s youthful success, and in Rebecca Clarke’s fierce resilience and survival instinct. It is fascinating and heartbreaking and always, thanks to Broad’s gentle persistence and open style, fiercely accessible.
This is the good stuff; a case well made, and rightfully so.
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Daisy May Johnson 